The latest victim of US politics? The index, with Michelle Obama’s bestselling memoir Becoming noticeably lacking one. “What were her publishers thinking?” wrote Ann Treneman in the Times. “Why in the world wouldn’t they want to provide what amounts to a road map for readers?”
Looking at recent memoirs, those by Stormy Daniels, Omarosa Manigault Newman and Joe Biden also go without. The pro-index camp include Hillary Clinton (What Happened has listings for both Benghazi and Bon Jovi, Jon), James Comey (featuring Group B streptococcus to The Godfather, part II) and Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (which lists 20-odd pages dedicated to Trump, Donald, “personality and behaviour of”).
Ruth Ellis, professional indexer, executive board director of the Society of Indexers and probably the best person to have on your pub quiz team, says they are becoming more rare, particularly in US political memoirs. “We do get quite a lot of people complaining about it.”
She says one of the main reasons a publisher might skip an index is sensitivity, especially with a big release such as Becoming. While UK indexers strictly observe a code of ethics that bars sharing sensitive material before publication, in the US publishers will slap anyone who sniffs the manuscript with a non-disclosure agreement. “If they don’t want to fuss over putting an NDA together, they just won’t hand it over to an indexer at all.”
Indexes tend to be organised at the very end of the publishing process; Ellis says a week before the manuscript goes to the printers is typical. But the state of US politics means publishers are turning over political memoirs at unprecedented speed. “Everyone wants to cash in on Trump, so these books are coming out faster than ever before, and it is likely they’re running out of time.”
There is also the matter of cost, although with a blockbuster such as Becoming, money is less likely to be a concern than preventing what Ellis calls “the Washington read” – where any DC hobnobber can go straight to the index to see if they are mentioned and skip the rest. But the real tragedy is not that Obama was unwilling to flag up the Trumpy bits but the blow to an artform. See: Partridge, Alan’s memoir Nomad for a glorious example: “Phalanx, nice use of the word” – easily located on page 73.
